Canadian Archival Materials / Documents d’archives canadiens

Federal Government / Le gouvernement fédéral

An official observatory was first established in Toronto in 1839 and a national meteorological service was organized in 1871. For more information about the history of state meteorology in Canada you can read Morley K. Thomas’ 2-part “Brief History of Meteorological Services in Canada” originally published in Atmosphere in 1971. This brief history summarizes his longer work, The beginnings of Canadian meteorology (1991).

Hudson’s Bay Company / La Compagnie de la Baie d’Hudson

The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives is made up of thousands of metres of material relating to the operations of the Company from it’s creation in 1670. Donated to the Province of Manitoba in 1994, the archive contains textual, photographic, and moving image material of both a descriptive and quantitative nature. The HBCA supplies a detailed finding aid to help in locating relevant material, however none of the holdings are digitised at this time.

The Hudson’s Bay Company operated forts and outposts throughout Northwest Canada, along with a large number of sailing vessels that travelled throughout Canada’s coastal waters. Data on geographical, social, and climatic conditions was collected in nearly every aspect of the Company’s operations. Of particular interest to those researching early Canadian climate are the Post Journals which were kept at 494 locations across Canada, recording daily weather and activities for the period of 1705 to 1941. Also of note are the Ships’ Logs for the 72 HBC ships that travelled throughout Canadian waters; these logs make regular reference to weather conditions in the area that they are travelling. The archive also contains 20 district reports containing records of climate, as well as data on the Northern and Southern Department fur returns.

The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives are of great potential value to researchers of early climate, particularly those concerned with climate and animal populations in the Canadian Northwest. Researchers have long recognized the environmental and historical value of the HBC records and some of the most extensive, existing studies of past Canadian climate and environments are based on these records. One of the most famous researchers in HBC records was renowned ecologist Charles Elton, who worked as a consultant for the Hudson’s Bay Company in the 1920s, and who used their journals to reconstruct fur-bearing animal population variation over the previous hundred years. Since the HBC opened their archives to the public in 1931, others have similarly used the HBC material for raw data on historical Canadian environments and climates which is otherwise unavailable. For a list of such material please consult the HBC Climate Bibliography.

George Colpitts from the University of Calgary has assembled a chart, which is a representative sample of Hudson’s Bay Company journals created to identify some of the journal coverage occurring concurrently within the company’s territories. You can download this chart below. For a detailed and complete listing of accounts, correspondence, journals and other documents from HBC posts, please visit this site.

Missionaries

Missionaries including the Moravians in Labrador (1771-1930s) and the Oblates across the Northwest (1844-1960s) often kept detailed records of weather and climate including instrumental data and general descriptions of local conditions. Missions were often established in remote places long before other Euro-Canadian settlements; their records thus offer wider and deeper coverage than otherwise available.

To learn more about the Oblate missionaries and the value of their records to environmental and climate history, take a look at our annotated bibliography on the Oblates (below). We have also compiled a translation key for the Oblate materials, identifying the key weather related terms and providing an English translation. You can download a copy below.

British Royal Navy

Many of the records from the British Royal Navy are available via CLIWOC.

The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans is an online database of weather data for the world’s oceans between 1750 and 1850. The project was a collaboration between several European Universities and was funded by the European Union between 2001 and 2003. The most recent update occurred in September 2006; according to Ricardo Garcia Herrera, the project’s manager, no future updates of the database are expected. The entire database is available freely for download from the website, www.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/ and is saved as a zipped .mdb file (Microsoft Access database).

The database includes information from ship logs on British, Dutch, French and Spanish vessels. These logs almost invariably show daily records of weather conditions at noon local time each day. Thousands of log books were examined and uploaded to the database, which includes 280 280 individual entries. Most of the points appear in the North Atlantic Ocean, but extensive data for the southern tip of Africa and the Indian Ocean are also available. The most prominent period for data is 1778-1780, with relatively little data between 1808 and 1835. All of the original log books are housed in European archives.

Each entry may include climatological information such as date, longitude and latitude, wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, temperature, air pressure and humidity – though the completeness of records varies widely. Because the instruments used by the sailors often pointed to the magnetic north rather than true north, the precise location of the record is difficult to discern. CLIWOC has provided a formula to correct for this but this is a complicated correction that casual users are unlikely to make.

In the interests of facilitating research into past Canadian climates, NiCHE has provided a filtered version of the database as an Excel file displaying only records falling between points of latitude and longitude that can loosely be considered as Canadian territorial water. There are 2082 such records from Atlantic Canada, Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific Coast. You can obtain this file here.